How to Design a Competitive Intelligence Dashboard I Would Use

Did you know that the original meaning of oxymoron was “pointedly foolish”? The word’s roots are Greek: oxys “sharp” and moros “stupid”. In search engine marketing, Competitive intelligence is an oxymoron. Competitive intelligence is a strategic game. Once you start playing that game you risk losing all your advantage by sharing what you do. We like to say there are no secrets in search engine optimization. You have your on page stuff and your off page stuff and then there is the search engine guidelines stuff. But the truth is that analysis is the most important part of search engine optimization. That has always been the case and that will always be the case. Nonetheless, I have to do most competitive intelligence in my head. The tools just don’t exist to do it the way I would want to do it. So here is what I would like to see in a truly functional, useful, helpful competitive intelligence dashboard. Feel free to build one for me. Start With a Website I want to see a small snapshot analysis of a the primary Website that I am using competitive analysis to protect and promote. I want to know the following things […]

Linux/Cdorked: A Nasty New Apache Hack

A couple of days ago I received this email from Miriam at SolasDesign and my first thought was: what rich Google irony: Hey Mike, I was doing a search in Google today for ‘google+ local error 500′ and one of the results Google returned was this page of your site: Google + Page ’500 error […]

Bill’s Most Excellent Top 10 SEO Rules

Somehow, in a Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure crossed with Michael Pollan’s Food Rules moment, I found myself typing out the following. No patents or whitepapers were involved in the creation of this post.

One URL per Page

In an ideal world, your site architecture should be set up so that search engine crawlers are […]

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How “Not Provided” May Make BuzzFeed Think Google’s Search Traffic To News Sites Is Down

Well look at that! Search traffic to news sites has dropped over the past eight months, according to how BuzzFeed tracks referrals to sites within its network. A change of user behavior? Or perhaps more the result of “Dark Google” and “Not Provided?” Come on, I’ll…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Google’s Matt Cutts: Holding A Patent Doesn’t Mean We Use That Patent In Search Quality

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, posted a YouTube video talking about a recent SEO misconception that he would like the SEO and webmaster world to “put to rest.” Matt said, just because Google has a search quality or ranking patent it does not mean that the patent was or…

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Google Closes European Places Support Forums

Today, Google announce the closing of foreign language forums for Google Places as of May 13th. It is not clear if language specific support will be available via email. The announcements can be seen in these various forums: Spanish: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/places-es Portugese: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/places-pt Russian: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/places-ru German: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/places-de/AEah3vEAUlk Here is the Google translation of the Spanish language announcment: Important Announcement: We […]

Great Marketing Often Misses the Mark on SEO

Traditional Marketing and SEO have often been on the opposite ends of the marketing spectrum. Content Marketing is the vehicle in which SEOs are dipping their toes into the Traditional Marketing realm.  As SEOs, our goal for Content Marketing is to gain links, search share and visibility through the great content we put out.  But […]

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This Year’s Doodle 4 Google Winner To Receive $30,000 College Scholarship

Beginning today and lasting through May 10, Google is asking users to vote for the best Doodle submitted by elementary and secondary school students from across the country. According to Google’s announcement, more than 130,000 submissions were received with fifty state winners selected as…

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Five Ways To Flip Your Copywriting For Higher Conversion Rates

When faced with creating a conversion-focused SEO landing page, what should our copy focus on? There are so many things we can do — so many directions we can go — that it becomes hard to know what to choose. Do I go with statistics or stories? Facts or feelings? Data or discounts? If…

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Data: The Digital Common Denominator

In April 2013, the IAB released a report that revealed double-digit growth for both search and display. Additionally, within digital, video was named the fastest-growing sector, reaching $2.3 billion. I spoke with three industry experts in display, sea…

Google Showing Sitelinks to Nearest Locations on Brand Searches

Last week Bill Slawski wrote about Google’s categorization of web pages for use in local search. The patent he writes about is one in a long line of related works that discuss this sort of web page categorization. That or something very similar to it appears to be occurring that allows Google to include multiple […]